Elected mayors? I'd rather be represented by a duke

How entirely typical that our beloved political elite should mark England’s national day by publishing proposals to screw up one of the few bits of our system of government that is both decorative and decorous, functional and inexpensive.

I have got into hot water before for defending the House of Lords. Clearing out some old newspapers at the weekend, I came across an impassioned reader’s letter of October 2009. Its author positively reeled in disbelief that anyone could hold to the “absurd” notion that there was a place in the “modern British constitution” for the hereditary peer.

But frankly I would much rather be represented in Parliament by a duke than almost any of our current crop of MPs. Apart from anything else, a man who has inherited a castle or two seems rather less likely to fiddle his expenses than someone who has clawed their way up the obsessives’ greasy pole of political research and special adviserships.

The Duke of Wellington: my kind of Prime Minister

While there may be some life peers whose curricula vitae leave a little to be desired, it also seems ironic that proposals to clear out the current House of Lords should be published on the very day that the papers carried obituaries of exactly the sort of member that the old system of nomination delivered so well: that doughty campaigner for the disabled, Lord Ashley.

However, I am prepared to forgive all this for the sheer delight of hearing Nick Clegg on the BBC on Sunday dismissing the need for a referendum on Lords reform in these words: “Why is it that we should spend a great deal of money, millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, asking the British people a question which frankly most people don’t worry about very much?”

In such marked contrast to, say, the great AV referendum of 2011, on which the great British public could scarcely contain their excitement. Or the current fatuous votes on “directly elected mayors”, for which we have clearly all been crying out since we saw such brilliant examples as Ken and Boris, the man in the monkey suit in Hartlepool and that English Democrat in Doncaster.

Hangus, Mayor of Hartlepool - almost making Ken look credible

If the people of Newcastle are daft enough to vote for this, we are told that the egotist who gains the position will have (undefined) “greater powers” and could take a leadership role across the whole of the “city region”. Including, presumably, the rural backwater in Northumberland that I call home.

In which case it seems pretty unfair that I am not also being given an opportunity to cast a vote against the idea. Government isn’t “Britain’s Got Talent”. We don’t need more star personalities. We need decent, principled and disinterested people prepared to undertake a necessary but thankless job.

Like most of the current members of the House of Lords, to pick an example entirely at random.

The Government wastes not millions, but billions of pounds of our money every single day. It makes me furious every time I contemplate it. Yet suggest a referendum on something about which a significant number of us clearly do care, like our continuing membership of the European Union, and there is never any shortage of reasons why it would be unconstitutional and unnecessary.

No wonder politicians are held in such minimal respect.

There are lots of things in Britain that aren’t working well. School leavers unfit for employment because they are functionally illiterate, the continuing travails of the NHS, overstretched armed forces and a collapsing pensions system, to name but a few. Against such fundamentals, having a Home Secretary who literally does not know which day of the week it is pales into insignificance.

Theresa May (or, in her diary, June). But probably Won't.

So as some people once said on the telly, I agree with Nick. The House of Lords hardly even begins to register on the very long list of things we need to worry about, so why doesn’t our cabinet of chum(p)s just move on and leave it alone?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Making the wrong choice about where to put the clock back

So at last the great moment arrived when David Cameron could claim his place in my pantheon of true Conservative heroes by attempting to put the clock back – and not simply because it was the end of British Summer Time.

True, it was disappointing that he chose to do it by announcing the reincarnation of the British Empire Medal.

For God and the Empire. How very un-Dave

An award for those deemed rather too common to meet the Queen, abolished by John Major in 1993 in his pursuit of a classless society. With his famous cones hotline long closed, this reversal threatens to undo one of the few defining achievements of his administration.

Sadly one small step backwards counted for little in a week when a raft of other measures betrayed Mr Cameron’s continued obsession with that falsest of gods, “progress”.

These included the attempt to “modernise” the monarchy by altering the rules of succession to give equal rights to female heirs. Few seemed to question that this was a good thing. But how can you possibly hope to drag a hereditary monarchy into the twenty-first century? It is, by its nature, a mediaeval anachronism. That is precisely why some of us find it so appealing.

Once you start tinkering with the ancient rules, people will start to wonder why we have to have the first-born son or daughter when the third in line seems so much more personable. Or, indeed, why we have to have a member of that particular family at all.

Long may she reign

The Royal Standard for Australia (never let it be said that this is not an educational column)

I cannot help thinking that this great step forward will look slightly less brilliant when some of the Commonwealth legislatures invited to amend the rules of succession decide to vote for a republic instead.

As if that were not enough, there was the bold decision in principle to defy Nature and put Britain, at least for a trial period, on Berlin rather than Greenwich time.

No need to bother with any of that nonsense - we'll cave in on the time zone issue without even being asked

A piece of craziness to rank alongside anyone ever imagining that they could place a hard-working, efficient and well-governed country like Germany in a currency union with an indolent, shambolic and corrupt one like Greece, and not face major problems.

But then the people who came up with the euro were not stupid. They always knew that it was economic nonsense. But it prepared the ground for the sort of “beneficial crisis” that would advance their goal of creating a single government for Europe.

And so, behold, it is coming to pass. Just as those derided loony Eurosceptics warned it would. And very soon the siren voices of the Europhiles will be raised again, warning that Britain cannot afford to be left behind as this “inevitable” Union progresses.

In fact they are at it already, with David Banks reminding us in his column on Friday about “the £150m Brussels earmarked this year to build jobs and prosperity in the North East”. Only it’s OUR money. Britain is the second largest net contributor to the great EU racket.

Being grateful for handouts we have paid for is a bit like thanking a mugger who considerately hands you a tenner for your cab fare home after he has pinched your wallet.

Take an issue about which a large chunk of the population feel strongly, whether that be capital punishment or the extinction of our independence as a nation, and you can be sure that the reaction of the political class will be to close ranks, stick their fingers in their ears and chant “La la la not listening” until we go away.

Except that, in an attempt to put the inconvenient European issue to bed, they have already passed an act requiring a referendum on any future treaty change that hands more power to Brussels. One of the delights of the coming months will be watching them trying to weasel out of that promise as the United States of Europe emerges unmistakably from the euro crisis.

But why worry? We will all be able to enjoy an extra hour of daylight in which to polish our BEMs and pray that the Duchess of Cambridge may be safely delivered of a girl. Because otherwise an awful lot of valuable Parliamentary time will have been expended in vain.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Once again the big winner is apathy

It is always a delight to see any political idea favoured by Eddie Izzard being decisively punted into oblivion, so last week saw the Hann household rejoicing for the second Friday in succession.

No

And who could resist a little surge of local pride on discovering that the North East had led the field in saying no to AV, with a majority of 71.9%?

A mere handful of places said “yes”: Oxford, Cambridge, a few smug inner London boroughs and their Edinburgh and Glasgow counterparts. Tempting me to the conclusion that we need never go to the trouble and expense of a national referendum ever again. Just obtain the newspaper wholesalers’ data on where The Guardian sells most strongly, hold local polls there, then do precisely the opposite of whatever they vote for. We won’t go too far wrong.

Though perhaps we should have one last national referendum on Scottish independence first. And I do mean a national referendum. How can you dissolve a marriage without consulting both of the contracting parties? Allowing Scotland alone to vote on its future would be like letting the children decide on their party guest list and entertainment without consulting the adults who actually have to pay for it.

But I am ignoring the pachyderm in the living quarters, which is this. Although pundits assure us that turnout in the AV referendum exceeded expectations, apathy was once again the big winner on polling day. A thumping 58% of my compatriots still found something more important to do than pootling down to their local school or village hall, and marking an “X” on a bit of paper.

How could this lot fail to inspire?

All right, it’s not very intellectually challenging and it doesn’t promise the same sort of returns as filling in a lottery slip, but in the Middle East people are currently dying for the right to do just this. How can you possibly conclude that it is more important to be scratching yourself on the sofa in front of Loose Women or The Jeremy Kyle Show?

Politics matter. Which celebrity is shagging which lady of easy virtue who previously enjoyed relations with which Premiership footballer does not.

Another thing that matters is our ability to hold our heads up in the world by adhering to certain standards of decency and fair play. From the invention of concentration camps in the Boer War to the recent revelations about our treatment of Mau Mau prisoners in Kenya, the reputation of the British Empire is certainly not an unsullied one.

But have the Americans, who worked so hard to bring our Empire to a conclusion, led us onto the broad sunlit uplands of probity and transparency?

Their support of assorted murderous tyrannies around the world, and their use of “extraordinary rendition”, extra-territorial detention camps, the extraction of information by torture and – yes, their ham-fisted inability to get their story straight about the cold-blooded killing of their public enemy number one in Abbotabad last week – all lead me to the conclusion that the world was a rather better and safer place when those chaps from Whitehall were in charge of it.

It’s not that I have any sympathy for Osama bin Laden, though his “command and control centre” looked to me rather more like a teenager’s bedroom that had been handed over to an OAP as part of a Channel 4 reality life swap show. But why would anyone conceive and execute the operation against him in a way that seems specifically designed to give conspiracy theorists a field day?

Latest version of events: the White House execution team hold their breath as the UK AV referendum results come in

The only thing that troubles me about my misgivings is that I have already found them shared by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and will no doubt soon find myself allied with the entire readership of The Guardian, including Eddie Izzard. So as you were, Mr President. Most reluctantly, Operation Geronimo gets my vote.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Give us a referendum that matters

I consider horse racing even more tedious than most normal people find politics. So the fact that I spent Sunday at a point-to-point meeting says much about the ‘miserable little compromise’ that is marriage.

Very firm ground meant that the fields were sadly diminished: to such an extent that the first race was a one-horse walkover (I always vaguely wondered where that expression came from).

But at least it was all mercifully quick once the racing finally started. When the horses crossed the line, people knew the result and could tear up or cash in their betting slips. They did not have to wait a couple of days while boffins with electronic counting machines worked out the real result based on the second, third and fourth preferences of those who had backed the most egregious losers.

Which is the way our electoral system will be heading if the ‘Yes to AV’ campaign triumphs in the forthcoming referendum. This is a system no one really wants, and has been put forward with the same sort of care and consideration that attended Mr Blair’s brilliant reform of the House of Lords.

The only real object of the change is to place more Liberal Democrat bottoms on the benches of the House of Commons. Though admittedly that looks a pretty long shot now that the Lib Dems have made themselves so monumentally unpopular through their participation in the Coalition.

And would more Lib Dem MPs, in any case, be a good thing? Did most of the people who voted for them in the past ever understand what they actually stood for? Is there any solid evidence that they have proved, on average, less expenses-hungry or sexually incontinent than their peers in the two larger parties?

More of these? Former Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik

More of these? Former Lib Dem MP Mark Oaten

More of these? Sitting Lib Dem MP Mike Hancock

True, they tend to work hard in their constituencies, because they don’t feel the God-given right of Labour or Tory MPs in ‘safe seats’, but that just encourages the regrettable trend for MPs to become glorified social workers.

What is wrong with our politics is not the system of voting, but the fact that it has become a career choice. Oddly enough, we were better served when the Labour benches were stuffed with thick ex-trade union officials, who found their Parliamentary salary a nice little earner, and the Tory side with thick knights of the shire who were too rich to care about remuneration. Both groups viewed going into Parliament as a public service rather than a way to advance their own interests.

Today’s brighter careerists expect to match the rewards and recognition achieved by their contemporaries who went to work as high-flying local authority administrators or investment bankers. The problem has only been made worse by insisting that becoming an MP must be regarded as a full-time job.

Those dutiful thickoes somehow helped to run the largest empire the world has ever seen. The present shower do little more than rubber stamp the instructions issued by the Brussels-based empire of which our country has, in another one of its periodic fits of absence of mind, become a province.

Which is why, if £90 million can be found in these cash-strapped times to hold a referendum, it would have made a lot more sense to devote it to clearing up the running sore of our European Union membership. An ‘in or out’ vote on that would surely arouse the sort of passions on both sides that seem singularly lacking in the AV campaign. It might even get the public re-engaged with politics, as politicians claim to want.

But God forbid they should hear from us on anything important. AV matters only a little bit to just some of them, and will do nothing at all to improve life for the rest of us. The simple, first past the post answer can only be this: just say ‘no’.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

2011 revealed

Old Mother Hann takes her traditional look into her cloudy crystal ball and attempts to predict the key events of 2011 for The Journal's nebusiness section:

Jan: VAT rises to 20%; Philip Green issues press release about how much more tax he will be paying as a result.
Feb: Simon Cowell launches new talent contest to find Britain’s most unpopular person; Nick Clegg faces Mike Ashley in final.
Mar: Silvio Berlusconi snatches surprise victory in Italian general election after inviting all male voters to a party.
Apr: Army bulldozers clear snowbound London streets for Royal wedding; Met Office predicts 2011 will be warmest year on record.
May: Britain votes ‘no’ in AV referendum; EU insists it must be repeated until voters give the right answer.
Jun: Duke of Edinburgh celebrates 90th birthday at “Celebrating Multicultural Britain” party; panic attacks put five royal aides in hospital.
Jul: Britain hosts last-ever Wimbledon finals before event moves to Sahara Desert; rumours of bribery strongly denied.
Aug: Reports of wind turbine actually revolving bring thousands of green energy “twitchers” to North East; hoax by tourism bosses uncovered.
Sep: Ed Miliband announces new Labour Party policies; David Cameron rebuked by Speaker for mocking his pronunciation of “policies”.
Oct: Cyber attack stops all online transactions and cash machine withdrawals worldwide; eight-year-old North Shields boy arrested.
Nov: Euro collapses; entire British banking system nationalised.
Dec: Bankers paid record bonuses.

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.